The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel

by Wangerin Jr. , Walter

  Two tax collectors crept near him and whispered, “Teacher, what about us?”

  In a full voice, without breaking stride, John said, “Collect no more than is appointed for the people of your region. Will you become poor for the loss of income? Yes. Will your families suffer the reduction? Yes. Will you wish, therefore, to quit your unpopular position? Yes, and that will be a decision you must make within your own heart. But to tax people above the legal designation is not a choice for citizens of the kingdom of God.”

  “Please, sir?” an elderly woman stood on the bank of the Jordan and spoke as John descended. “Teacher, please?” She was dressed in widow’s weeds. “I’m a Jew,” she said. “But before the coming judgment I am nothing more than a convert. Wash me like a convert. Please, sir, baptize me.”

  John the son of Zechariah approached the woman and peered into her eyes.

  “You know the need of your repentance?”

  She nodded.

  “And you trust the forgiveness signed by this washing?”

  She nodded—trembling now. John took her elbow in his large hand, then, and led her out into the water. They waded ten paces together, fifteen long paces. He held her elbow to steady her. They sank to their waists.

  John spoke a word into the woman’s ear. Suddenly she crouched and rolled forward and vanished under the bubbling surface.

  John waited while the river flowed to smoothness, then he slapped the water with the flat of his hand and called, “Woman, in repentance you are clean! Child of the light, citizen of the kingdom to come, arise!”

  He reached into the river, then brought the woman up by her shoulders. She made an explosive exhalation, threw back her head, whipping the air with her hair and sending a circle of water up to the sunlight. She began to laugh. Her widow’s clothes clung closely to her body. Her eyelashes sparkled with water drops.

  John’s mantle was splashed dark. The long ends of his hair and beard dripped water. He turned toward shore, and that gesture seemed to release all the people lined up along the water. Like a herd of thirsty animals, they all began to wade toward John: tax collectors, soldiers, Pharisees, Sadducees, shepherds, shopkeepers, potters, butchers, scribes, the reverential Essenes—people filled with a terrible yearning. Jews. They rushed out into the Jordan, repenting, confessing their sins in a grand cacophony, seeking each to be baptized by John and so to enter the kingdom.

  John cried, “Yes, I baptize you. But there comes after me one so much mightier than I that I am not worthy to stoop and unloose the thong of his sandal! I baptize you with water. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

  III

  IN THE MIDST of the multitudes that came daily to the Jordan for baptism, there appeared one figure separated from the rest. John turned and saw the man standing upriver among some reeds, waiting. Reflected sunlight played upward from the water on his face, trilling the flesh below his eyebrows and cheekbones, below his nose and his chin. He had amber eyes, gazing directly at John.

  He was clean-shaven, like a Roman—or, it occurred to John, like one of the prophets mournful for the future, for they would shave their beards.

  Amber eyes! John recognized those golden corneas, polished, laconic, and nearly translucent. No one else had such a fathomless gaze. This must be the cousin John had not seen since the Passover when his father had died. Eighteen years ago! Eighteen years, and still those eyes had that lidded rich regard. This was the one of whom his mother had said once, “He is my Lord.”

  The man among the reeds lifted his hand in greeting.

  John nodded. Jesus, then! This was Jesus!

  Jesus began to wade downriver, to the deeper water where John was standing.

  When they stood face-to-face, John saw copper flecks in the iris of his cousin’s eye.

  Jesus said, “John, baptize me.”

  For a moment John hesitated.

  “John,” said Jesus, “baptize me.” Without waiting for an assent, he closed his eyes, sank down and slipped under the water. His long hair lingered on the surface for a short while, then it, too, was pulled down into darkness and disappeared.

  These were swift, breathless events for John. So much raced through his mind: his family, his past, his fierce convictions, the future of his people, Israel.

  The day and the weather and all events now tightened down to one small focus: this air, this round patch of river, flat and calm in the sunlight, and this sudden, preternatural silence.

  Time seemed to collapse—and when John came to himself he could not remember how long Jesus had been lying on the riverbed.

  In a quick panic he slapped the water with the flat of his hand and cried: “Child of the light and the kingdom to come, rise up!”

  There was a continued, shining silence—then Jesus, like a great fish, heaved from the water, and immediately the heavens above them split asunder and there flew down a dove, a white dove, a blinding white dove which alighted on the shoulder of Jesus—white fire beside his face—and in that same instant a voice broke from heaven, saying: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

  Immediately Jesus began to move from John toward the eastern shore of the river. His expression was intense but unreadable. His manner seemed so nearly wolfish—like a predator following an invisible scent—that the people on land backed away and made a path for him.

  Jesus was withdrawing from the public with some fierce purpose.

  And then John saw that the white dove was flying in spirals ahead of Jesus, leading the way.

  Oh, that was no common dove! That was none other than the Holy Spirit who had brooded over the wild waters of creation and then again the waters of the flood!

  John folded his huge hands at his throat and whispered: “You, Jesus, greater than me—your life shall be more terrible than mine. Wherever the Holy Spirit is driving you now, God help you there! God help you, cousin.”

  IV

  JESUS IS IN THE WIDE, dry spaces of the wilderness. Except for the savage beasts that paw the spoor where he has wandered, he is solitary.

  The Spirit that seized him at his baptism has sent him deep into the desert, far from civilization, far from people and comfort and shelter and food. In forty days Jesus has eaten nothing. The scoop of his abdomen makes skeletal all his bones. At night he shivers in the cold. In the morning his lips are cracked. His tongue is swelling. He cannot swallow. By midday the heat of the sun grows intolerable, like a brass weight on his shoulders.

  Jesus sits with his back against one stone of a dolmen. The flat capstone—a table on boulders higher than a man when he is standing—casts the shadow in which he sits. His head has sunk between his knees. He is pressing his forearms against his stomach.

  Suddenly he feels the presence of coolness. Not a wind. An element, rather: something like ice nearby.

  Jesus raises his head and sees light above him on the dolmen, a column of white light rising from this ancient rock into the sky, the radiance of a cold, ineluctable power.

  Within the polish of this light there is the image of a beautiful man. Indeed, the light is this splendid figure near to Jesus, who is crouching in the dull ache of starvation.

  With unctuous sympathy, the light speaks.

  “Yeshi,” it says, “if you are the Son in whom God takes such pleasure, why shouldn’t you comfort yourself and eat?”

  Jesus neither stands nor answers. He regards the icy light as though it were a savage beast sniffing too close to him.

  The light smiles. “Command these stones to become bread,” it says. “You have that power. You can do that.”

  Jesus bows his head and closes his eyes and in a hoarse voice whispers: “It is written, No one lives by bread alone, but by every word that issues from the mouth of God.”

  “Ah, yes, we can both quote Scripture,” says the light, “you to hide within it, I to call you forth and grant you knowledge, fame, and a universal name!”

  All at once the cold becomes an engulfing, bindi
ng pressure on Jesus from his ankles to his face. A wind arises and begins to scream. When Jesus opens his eyes he finds that the light has completely surrounded him, canceling the desert in a pale fog. Then he feels a footing beneath him. He stands, and the light releases him, lightly moving to one side, smiling—and so Jesus is able to see that he has been transported to the highest corner of the temple wall, below which all Jerusalem is scattered like pebbles. Here the priests blow trumpets to cry in the New Year. Here is thin air and a giddy height.

  The cool light speaks. “Jesus,” it says, “if you are the Son whom God loves, cast yourself down. For it is promised in the Psalms, He shall charge his angels to guard you. They will bear you in their hands to keep you from dashing even your foot against a stone. In such a public place, who could not recognize that you are the darling of the Almighty God?”

  But Jesus stands dead still in the lofty air and whispers, “It is written, You shall not tempt the Lord your God.”

  In a flash Jerusalem vanishes, and Jesus is not on the temple wall. He is infinitely higher than anything made by hands—and the frozen light is now a snow where he is standing, the white rind of a cosmic mountain. This is the peak that rose first above the waters when God’s diluvian wrath drowned all earthly things except for Noah and his kin. This is the eminence from which all the world is visible, from sea to sea to sea.

  Now it is the great glacial ice that speaks, the crawling capstone of dolmen earth.

  “Jesus of Nazareth, look!” it booms. “See the kingdoms one by one, the jewels of creation. Mark their power and their glory. Review their histories from the beginning till now, from now until forever. All this, all these wonders will I give into your hands—to rule them all—if you but bow down and worship me.”

  But Jesus does not look at the kingdoms of the world. He sits down on the terrible mountain and closes his eyes and whispers, “But I know you. I know what sort of angel you are. Satan, tempter, betrayer—begone! For it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.”

  In that same instant, Jesus is sitting with his back against one boulder of a dolmen in the desert under a severe sunlight. For the sun has circled the sky and has taken his shade away.

  He draws lines with his finger in the dust. In Hebrew he writes the words: The devil departs. For a season.

  V

  WHO ARE YOU?”

  “Why do you ask? Is this a secret? I am John the son of Zechariah.” “Yes, yes, everyone knows your name. What we don’t know is your authority. What status do you claim under God? Why do you baptize?”

  It was the cool of the evening. The sky had a winy beauty which, as his disciples knew, always comforted John at this turning between day and day. Tonight he was obviously tired. None of the disciples would have spoken to him now. But strangers didn’t know any better.

  After the crowds had gone home for supper, John had stretched himself on a grassy hill outside the tiny transjordan village named Bethany. He had folded a goatskin as his pillow beneath his head. Four of the disciples were sitting in conversation at a distance. Nearer, close to his side, a fifth disciple was squatting by a heap of hot coals, broiling fish.

  And then came this delegation from Jerusalem, priests and Levites representing the temple and the Sanhedrin. The hems of their wonderful garments were dry and clean because they forded the Jordan on donkeys.

  They dismounted, approached John on the grassy hill, and greeted him loudly enough to rouse him.

  John squinted up at them, leaned on one elbow, and nodded his own greeting in return.

  Under these odd conditions, then, the delegation began its inquiry:

  “John the son of Zechariah, who do you claim to be? No one can deny the power of your preaching. It burns like a fire throughout Judea. But neither does anyone know by what right you do these things. Are you,” they said, “the Messiah?”

  No one was laughing, neither John nor his interrogators nor the quiet disciple broiling fish nearby. So great was the desire for the coming of God’s Anointed One, that the question was repeated often among the Jews, touching every charismatic individual who appeared: Is this the one? Has Messiah finally come?

  On the other hand, the same desire in so many people could empower false Messiahs to do harm in the land.

  “Are you the Messiah?” the delegation asked.

  John shook his head. “No,” he said. Tough and lean in his mantle of camel’s hair, he said, “I am not the Messiah.”

  “Who then?” said the priests. “Are you Elijah whom God promised to send before the great and terrible day of the Lord?”

  John said, “I am not.”

  “Then what of that prophet?” The delegation was standing in a semicircle at John’s feet. He had continued to recline before them. “Moses wrote that God would raise up for us a prophet just like him. He said that the Lord would put his words in that prophet’s mouth, and of those who didn’t heed those words, the Lord himself would require a recompense—”

  “But the prophet,” said John, quoting Moses, “who presumes to speak in the Lord’s name what the Lord had not commanded—” John paused and sighed. “—that same prophet shall die.”

  “Yes. Moses wrote that, too. So are you that prophet?” the priests asked.

  “No.”

  “Then who are you? Sir, we must have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”

  John gazed at the delegation a while, then said, “A voice.” He lay back on the ground again, his head resting on the goatskin pillow. He closed his eyes. “Tell your superiors,” he said, “that you went out into the wilderness and there you met a voice, nothing more, nothing less. And wherever you traveled, over mountains, valleys, rough land, and water, that voice was crying, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord!’”

  John folded his huge hands upon his chest. Soon he was breathing with a deep regularity.

  The priests and the Levites glanced at one another, amazed. Then they called to the disciple who was broiling fish. “You, man. You, there, what’s your name?”

  The disciple said, “Andrew.”

  “Andrew,” they said, “do you see what your master is doing?”

  “Yes,” Andrew said. “He’s sleeping.”

  “Well, wake him up! Who does he think he is? Not only does he insult us, he’s insulting the whole priesthood in Jerusalem who sent us to him. Wake him up, or we will.”

  Andrew stood up smiling. “The man is tired,” he said. “I’m sorry, sirs, I won’t wake him—and I won’t let you try. But here is some fish. You may share a meal with us, if you wish.”

  Evidently they did not wish. Without another word the officials mounted their donkeys and rode through darkness in the direction of Bethany.

  EARLY THE FOLLOWING morning Andrew himself woke up to the sound of John’s voice, a joyful, energetic cry.

  John was standing on the grassy hill, peering eastward into the sunrise. He had shaded his eyes with his left hand. “There,” he called, waking Andrew.

  John raised his right hand and pointed straight into the light. “There,” he said. “There he comes!”

  Andrew and another disciple climbed the hill to John’s side, trying to see what he was pointing at.

  “There!” John cried. “Don’t you see him? That is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”

  Andrew saw someone walking in their direction. Tangled hair. He looked emaciated, gaunt in the cheek. His step was slow and cautious, as if all his bones were brittle.

  John said: “Forty days ago I baptized that man, and I saw the Spirit descend from heaven as a dove, and remain on him. Then the Lord God, who sent me to baptize with water, said to me, He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit! Yes, and I heard the voice from heaven declare that he is the Son of God. His name is Jesus. He comes from Nazareth.”

  The solitary figure had drawn near enough now that Andrew could see
his features. Light brown eyes, calm and lidded. They regarded John with friendly recognition. Then they looked directly at Andrew himself and at the other disciple.

  The Lamb of God: this Jesus had a thin growth of beard, perhaps a month’s growth, neither oiled nor brushed, unkempt.

  He said to John, “It is well.”

  John nodded and answered, “Yes, cousin, it is well. And it shall be well. Are you hungry?”

  “Plain bread,” Jesus said. Then, to Andrew he said, “Do you have any fish? Have you been fishing yet this morning?”

  Andrew swallowed. He couldn’t immediately answer. In fact, he was by occupation a fisherman, but—

  Jesus said, “I’d like some fish to break my fast.”

  Andrew immediately took to his heels and ran toward the village in order to find some fish.

  By the time he returned, the new man was washed, combed, cleanshaven and waiting. He had a wavy, raven-black hair—and eyes of a peculiar hue: a dazzling brown, like disks of polished gold. His glance was steadfast, his complexion ruddy, his whole aspect comely.

  “There’s no need to hurry,” he said to Andrew. “Where did you find my breakfast?”

  “My brother,” Andrew answered breathlessly. “Simon. He doesn’t sleep much. He had already netted some small fish in the river.”

  All morning Andrew could not tear his attention from this visitor. He watched how Jesus blessed the food, how he ate, how he spoke with John, gazing directly at him, maintaining a soft, insistent tone, how he shaped individual words with a careful rounding of the mouth, how he stood, how he moved, with what grace he prepared to depart—and then, in that moment of departure, Andrew suffered an exquisite physical longing to follow him. It felt like the rending of silk inside his breast.

  Jesus began to walk down to the river alone, toward the ford that led to Jericho. Andrew watched him go, pursing his lips and sighing.

  Suddenly a great hand fell on his shoulder. John was beside him, the master unto whom he had given commitment. Young Andrew!—his heart cracked between two desires.